The Impact of Executive and Board Dynamics

This dissertation investigates how executive and board dynamics affect corporate behaviors, particularly in financial reporting integrity and CSR-related outcomes. The first study examines the impact of CEO-CFO social alignment, quantified through language style matching, on financial misreporting tendencies. By exploring linguistic synchronization as a measure of ingratiation, the research identifies thatincreased alignment in language correlates with financial misreporting. The second paper focuses on CEO disagreeableness and assesses how governance mechanisms, tailored to this specific personality trait influences a firm's CSR performance. The study seeks to identify which governance structures are most effective for managing CEOs with distinct personality attributes to foster CSR performance. The final project analyzes how overlapping membership between CSR and compensation committees affects CSR pay quality. By examining board committee composition I find that knowledge transfer across committees improves CSR-linked compensation. Together, these studies underscore the role of executive-board interactions in shaping financial and CSR outcomes, offering a nuanced understanding of governance dynamics in corporate settings.